Letter from Slim Wolfe
Colorado Central – October 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado Central:
Do Colorado Central’s paid writers think twice knowing that Slim is parked to the side and over the next little rise with his nonsense detector aimed at oncoming verbiage?
Here are some more thoughts on recent topics: John Mattingly’s somewhat facetious suggestions that the state ought to issue licenses to livestock ranchers raised the hope that someone might start regulating public music performances, and set a minimum for levels of presentable songwriting. Music has too often become a means to sell more alcohol, rather than a means to lift the spirit and the mind. Watching a young feller at the Silver Crest Palace in Crestone recently. I doubted if any audience in a more civilized part of the world (Africa, Europe, Latin America) would have stayed through even the first number, but Americans have had their senses deadened for generations by a commercial product which is designed to keep them in what Crestone songwriter Lonnie Roth calls the “comfort zone.”
Put on a purple headscarf, sing in an unintelligible monotone, crank out some chords without any progression, and thump the pedal of a flat-sounding bass-drum to force the crowd’s attention and — voila — you’re the darling of the drunken hip-oisie.
More to the point of Mattingly’s item is the larger question of regulating red meat production to the benefit of the larger economy and the planet at large, never mind the profit or loss of the rancher or the health and happiness of the critters in question. Here in Colorado Central territory we don’t know the stink of a feed-lot, the pollution of a packing-plant or the dehumanizing nature of employment in the chop-shop, or being snagged in an immigration raid. The mess of this business doesn’t end when you ship out your fattened livestock and pick up your check.
Virginia Simmons’s story of the historic shoot-out was entertaining. but left me wondering at her repeated description of the protagonists as drifters. Drifting is a defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, though some drifters seem to get elevated to nobility in our thoughts if they have well-heeled backers as in the case of Zeb Pike., et al. Didn’t ranch homesteaders of the 1860s drift around a bit as well, looking for better locations? And where would we be if Ed and Martha hadn’t drifted over to Kremmling and thence to Salida, as drawn by the circumstances of life and journalism?
So now we’ve got a class distinction to set apart drifters as well as a separate class for thinkers, if we read George Sibley’s item on the new French regime of President Sarkozy. Bien sur, it’s not a good idea, in America or France, to keep up this Greco-Roman notion of well-funded think-tanks which shape policy while the other 99% just wear the harness and pull.
Better that we regulate our lawyers, economists, and politicians by insisting that they do a three-year residency in some grunt-labor low-wage slot and another year in low-level management. Oops, sorry, does that sound like a Communist plot? Am I really in favor of a classless society? Am I just imagining that that was part of the American dream as well?
Maybe there have always been the two Americas, dating right back to the revolution: on one side, the Americans who wanted liberte, fraternite, et eglite; on the other hand, the Americans who stood to make a bigger profit without the meddlesome big government of some king named George and his cronies.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
